Your Way Home Emergency Rent & Utility Coalition
The Emergency Rent and Utilities (ERUC) Program is designed to provide housing stability to low- and moderate-income Montgomery County, Pennsylvania residents at risk of eviction and/or homelessness as a result of COVID-19. The charts below details the total ERA amount disbursed to Montgomery County residents. To learn how to apply for ERUC assistance, please visit yourwayhome.org/eruc today.
As Your Way Home continues to prioritize its commitment to ending homelessness, we recognize that we must also develop solutions that will help prevent more families and individuals from losing their housing.
Homelessness prevention is an expansion of the work already done by Your Way Home, and targets those who are at risk of losing their housing. Diversion is a set of strategies to assist homeless households to resolve their housing crisis as quickly as possible without entering a shelter or a rapid re-housing program.
Upstream Prevention Strategies
Successful prevention efforts should start prior to the point at which a person is calling a hotline for immediate assistance. To that end, Your Way Home pursued several grants to pilot two upstream prevention programs:
The Eviction Prevention and Intervention Coalition (EPIC) is a court-based project that provides free legal and social services, as well as financial assistance when necessary. Learn more about EPIC’s performance here.
The Sprout Initiative provided social services and housing assistance to families with young children who were imminently at risk of becoming homeless. To learn more about how stable housing leads to better educational outcomes for students, click here.
Prevention for Callers at Imminent Risk of Homelessness
Individuals experiencing a housing crisis can call the Your Way Home Call Center for triage and assessment. For those callers who are not experiencing street homelessness, but are at imminent risk of losing their housing, the Call Center will administer the Your Way Home Prevention Assessment.
The assessment provides guidance about resources and referrals to supportive services that can help stabilize the caller’s housing crisis.
Your Way Home believes strongly in prevention because it works. The majority of callers administered the Prevention Assessment do not become homeless afterward.
This means that most callers who contact the Call Center are able to successfully resolve their housing crisis without further intervention of the homeless system.
However, some callers do become homeless afterward. On average, for callers who enroll in Street Outreach after receiving a Prevention Assessment, the length of time is:
Diversion from Homelessness
For callers seeking emergency shelter, the Your Way Home Call Center will first attempt to help resolve the immediate crisis through diversion, so that the caller does not need to enter the homeless crisis response system. As a strategy and not a specific program, diversion can happen at any point in a person’s housing crisis.
Households who are not able to be diverted from the homeless system are served by Your Way Home’s Street Outreach teams. Outreach provides support for residents sleeping outside or in other places not meant for habitation, including blankets and other supplies, as well as coordination of entry into one of Montgomery County’s emergency shelters when available.
Sometimes, Outreach workers are able to assist unsheltered individuals to resolve their homeless crisis without needing to enter a shelter, rapid re-housing, or other homeless project.
Per quarter, this accounts for the following percentage of all exits from Street Outreach:
As a result of these diversion strategies, entries into emergency shelters from a housed or doubled-up situation fell from 45% in 2014, to 8% in 2019. To learn more, visit our shelter performance page.